Cooper: Understanding today's Quebec nationalism

Celine Cooper, Special to the Gazette01.21.2013

Gazette columnist Celine Cooper.

From 2007: In observance of the Journée nationale des patriotes, a group from Les jeunes patriotes du Québec paraded outside the walls of Au Pied du Courant, the former prison where some of the Patriotes of the 1837 rebellion were hanged.Liam Mahoney
/ Gazette file photo

MONTREAL — I’m interested in how young Quebecers develop and arrive at their ideas about nationalism.

How and where are they being influenced on “the national question” in Quebec? By whom are they being mentored? On what basis do they craft their perspectives and arguments? What kind of intellectual or political cross-pollination is shaping, inspiring and challenging their ideas?

Asking these kinds of questions gives me a sense of how and where the complexities of power work within “the national project” in Quebec and in the broader Canadian context. The answers help me to better understand our political community, its continuities and ruptures over the years, and how we conceive of ourselves (and others) as political subjects with the means to define or represent our collective national identity.

According to its website, the group was founded to promote — or return to — the idea of a Quebec nation rooted in the cultural history of the francophone majority.

A close reading of the manifesto suggests that Génération nationale, which advances a conservative brand of Quebec nationalism, has been markedly influenced by the writings of Mathieu Bock-Côté. For those unfamiliar with his work, Bock-Côté is a formidable — if not uncontroversial — figure in the elucidation of neo-conservative Quebec nationalism. He is a sociologist at the Université du Québec à Montréal and a columnist at the Journal de Montréal, and has published extensively, including the books La dénationalisation tranquille in 2007 and Fin de cycle in 2012.

Génération nationale situates its vision of the Quebec nation in a space between two perceived ideological poles: on the one hand, the left with its cosmopolitan, “citizen-of-the-world” mentality and its “rhetoric of tolerance,” which the group believes is used to camouflage a “virtuous self-denial;” and on the other hand, the libertarian right, which resists the idea of collective rights and national identity, and whose members can be categorized as federalist, “anglomane” partisans of the world of global finance and “obsessed with mass American culture” (my translations).

For what it’s worth, these kinds of ideological cleavages — whether real or perceived — are not new. For example, as philosopher Jocelyn Maclure at Université Laval and others have discussed, historiographical interpretations of the “national project” since the 1940s have more or less been dominated by the debates between proponents of a “tragic” nationalism rooted in humiliation and defeat and proponents of a more cosmopolitan anti-nationalism.

So where does this leave us today?

As this manifesto suggests, Quebec is at a crossroads of nation and identity.

But I have to wonder: is it at all possible that resolving our “national question” is not necessarily about finding a space between the right and the left ideologies (or certain conceptions of what we may believe right and left to be in the Quebec nationalist discourse)? And not necessarily about seeking national convergence (a major topic of conversation last week, when the group Nouveau mouvement pour le Québec announced that the goal of a new movement known as Convergence nationale would be to gather the various sovereignist groups together to develop a common strategy on the Quebec national question)?

Could it be worth asking whether it is, in fact, the language of nationalism that is hindering our collective efforts to move forward together? Is such a conversation — one that destabilizes the idea of nation itself — even conceivable in Quebec? If not, that alone may be worth a broader public discussion.

Like many sovereigntist groups and political parties in Quebec, Génération nationale seems to argue that the “nation” is the only natural, logical and inevitable way to organize society and to ensure the self-actualization and survival of a people, and that statehood is the only way for Quebec’s culture and language to be legitimized.

I am in no position to say for certain whether these assumptions are right or wrong.

What I can say is that it is worth asking questions about what kind of political and intellectual influences have — or have not — led the members of Génération nationale and others to these conclusions.

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